Analysts and Associates: Who Will Help Us?
Apologies in advance if this ramble is of limited coherence, I have not slept much in the past week.
Recently, there have been a few high-profile health incidents in IB. The BofA veteran death, the Jefferies Texas death, the GS hospitalization (?)/passing out at the desk, and this recent news out of BMO. As a human being, I feel horrible for these young peoples’ loved ones. I want to, first and foremost, center these individuals, and not allow their humanity to fall by the wayside in focusing on broader industry trends.
That being said, I worry that there is a connection between these incidents and the nature of the industry. That is, extreme and abusive overwork is likely related to these incidents, even if it is not always the sole, proximate cause.
This is not a normal thing to be happening to men in their 20s and 30s.
It has become clear that no responsibility is being taken for this. Abusive MDs and staffers have stayed on, senior leadership has been disengaged if not outright offensive (the Jamie Dimon tone), clients are not pulling business over this, HR is not intervening, and market forces are not helping as there is no shortage of candidates to churn-and-burn through.
The best advice I’ve gotten so far is “push back on unreasonable demands and if you get fired, you get fired.” But this isn’t an option for everyone, for those who need this job for their livelihood.
So what can we do? What is the answer?
The concerns you’ve raised echo sentiments shared in some of the most impactful discussions on WSO. Here’s what the community has identified as potential steps to address the systemic issues in investment banking:
Industry-Wide Policies and Accountability:
There have been calls for creating a general industry policy to protect junior bankers from overwork and abuse. This could include:
Cultural Change from the Top:
Change must start at the senior leadership level. Without real incentives for management to prioritize junior banker well-being, the culture will remain unchanged. Suggestions include:
Third-Party Oversight:
To address conflicts of interest, some have proposed involving non-biased third parties (e.g., HR or external auditors) to track hours and enforce policies. This would ensure that staffers and MDs are held accountable without internal bias.
Empowering Junior Bankers:
While pushing back on unreasonable demands is often suggested, it’s not always feasible for everyone. Instead:
Leveraging Community Pressure:
Platforms like WSO have the reach to amplify these issues and push for change. By highlighting banks that treat their employees well and exposing those that don’t, the community can influence where top talent chooses to work, creating a competitive incentive for better practices.
Client Awareness:
Educating clients about the human cost of their demands could also help. If clients start prioritizing ethical practices, banks may be forced to adapt.
While these solutions won’t fix everything overnight, they represent actionable steps that could make a meaningful difference. The key is sustained pressure and collective action from both within and outside the industry.
Sources: , Death from Overwork (Karōshi) in Finance, How can we do better?, WSO 2022 Investment Banking Work-Conditions Survey (Part 1/3), Summer Analyst dies at Lincoln International
Bump
What happened at BMO?
According to a post here, a junior banker there had a heart attack. Some comments there claimed it was not a heart attack, but another medical episode, and paramedics were on scene. Regardless of what it was, consensus is work-induced life-threatening medical incident.
And the key point you fail to emphasize is that all the casualties have been over-worked male Analyst and Associates. The “self-righteous” clients in past didn’t want to do business with teams with no females or GS didn’t want to take companies public unless they have females on BoD but here you have male juniors suffering due to DEI favoritism, and not a single word of support from either senior bankers or clients.
This DEI stuff is exhausting. Don't use tragedies like these to push your "anti woke / DEI" bullshit. Save it for when you're groveling at the feet of the people who lead your alt-right hate group you call a political party, "Principal in IB".
Woke liberals like you only prefer opinions which fit their narrative of the world. Sorry to break it to you but neither clients nor senior bankers will change their demands, the underlying issue is favoritism towards females juniors in the shape of lower workloads which means male juniors end up picking the slack and getting over-worked.
“Woke liberals” lol. You’re a grown man, act like it. I don’t push any agenda, and I fundamentally disagree with having a disproportionate amount of females or minority hires IF they’re only hired because of that AND there are other more qualified individuals out there. My problem with you is using this stale incel argument to push hate on a platform meant to help college students educate themselves on career choices. Go get laid kid.
Been happily married for two years and have a kid. Now go cry in your gender neutral stall.
I think we can thread the needle here.
Anti-women, anti-minority, anti-LGBT, antisemitic, and Islamophobic hate speech is wrong. We should not preach hate against minority groups or women in response to our poor working conditions. We must strive for inclusive growth.
That being said, these episodes tend to occur among men. Whilst women are abused as well, it seems as if men on Wall Street are more likely to experience abuse. I can understand why some men do not want this to be dismissed as an irrelevant detail.
If there are juniors who aren't pulling their weight, it's going to be a contributor to incidents like this. That goes for DEI hires, unqualified nepo babies, kids who crush the interview but for some reason don't perform on the job . . one of the ways the industry can address OP's concern is to make sure only the talent is up to par so they don't have a few grinders carrying everyone else's load.
I dont see how this is DEI related. What does the presence of women & minorities have anything to do with health incidents from overwork? As you said, these recent incidents happened to men, so it’s not as if you can claim DEI gave those people a job they were unfit for (not to mention being physically fit and not having a family history of medical problems shouldn’t be a requirement for the job),
Nobody is after minorities. The prime beneficiaries of DEI are women (especially white). When they refuse to grind like their male counterparts and aren’t held accountable then male juniors are forced to pick up the slack which is what led to this unfortunate event.
Dude clients dont even know who is even on the deal team below MD / Director
This is what they want, for us to fight amongst ourselves. When the real villains are the guys up top
Cry me a river dude. You didn’t get top bucket because of your performance not DEI. Stop whining like a true DEI hire
I’m guessing this is William Blair? If so, all the juniors in my class promised each other that if one of us die in the office, the surviving ones will sue the firm on that person’s behalf.
And the courts will just say you could've quit at any time lol
The 'just quit' argument lol. Brought to you by people who've never faced a real-life responsibility in their existence. Wish life is easy enough to just quit.
Have noticed that these incidents seem to be all happening in the USA / Canada. I know the amount of IB/finance professionals there is much larger but does anyone think this is perhaps representative of the more intense American culture? I don't seem to hear these same stories coming out of LDN
Could be as IB in North America disproportionately recruited liberal leaning females in recent past and armed (figuratively) them against their male peers
Pretty sure an intern had a seizure in London a couple years back
you wrote the answer yourself:
and no, you don't need an IBD job for your livelihood. vast majority of people exit IB, and so can you. use your IB job to get a job with reasonable work-life balance and leave.
only way to change this is to tighten up the pipeline to IB. too many damn kids wanting to do this job (especially from india and china).
basically make this an elite targets school/us citizens only thing - no resume drops online / need to be referred by a current employee (basically what it was decades ago) to get an interview and you wont have this feeling where seniors can abuse the juniors because there are millions of kids from Bengalaru or Ohio State University waiting to fill the void.
See you are racist. You have no issue with incompetent women (mostly white/asian) taking ~50% of seats as long as they are US born. Students from India / china are often bright and account for 5% seats across the street. My issue with DEI is that it promotes incompetence and reduces productivity while your bone with DEI is that your ego can’t handle losing out indian / chinese.
literally over half the MBA resumes I looked at this year were from india. I found indians to be the most gunner/hardos as well. every indian senior I have worked with treated the junior team like we were a lower caste or something. just ZERO concern for our feelings/work life balance.
they are mostly a cultural drag on the floor. I dont care about indians born in america. Im talking the ones from literal india.....and theres are like millions of them willing to work 100 hour weeks and ready to push 100 hour weeks tot he juniors below them at a moments notice to fill an open slot
the chinese...I mostly think they are passing along MNPI to their CCP family/friends back home.
it is simple. you need to help yourself. impose a deadline of say 12am and call it a night. the implications are nothing compared to your life. at worst you get low bucket with a $5k-10k difference. your staffers do not care about you and neither do your MDs. they care about their bottom line
Would better data and tracking help? I feel like a huge issue is staffers don’t take me seriously when i say I’m under water and they just assume I’m overblowing it. I shouldn’t need to look like a zombie in the office for someone too see I’m at my breaking point
If enforced, yes. But this data would have to be meticulously kept track of and limits would have to be strictly enforced … but they’ve got no incentive to do this
Yeah nah. As a poster above says all senior bankers care about is the bottomline and collecting their bonuses to finance their lifestyles
interesting
I'll start by saying that the hours I've seen these days are insane. Just came off a transaction where the juniors on the other side were pulling multiple all nighters every week. On very unnecessary shit too. It's nuts. I don't remember working those hours when I was coming up. Am very very sympathetic.
The ZIRP days have bred a generation of newer MDs who rode easy street. They didn't need differentiated ideas, deep relationships, strategic thinking and ability to move the chess pieces or influence the game. You'd throw a deal into the market meat grinder and shit got done. All the SPAC trash is a testament to this.
The taps are unfortunately off now. The down cycle is always the worst because it's pitch pitch pitch, chasing any and every shitty deal and generally survival mode. But now you have this useless lot leading the charge.
In the last 6 months, I've been across the table or alongside some of these junior MDs at these coveted BBs / EBs. The general approach to "adding value" is adding pages lol. Not thoughtful advice to boards, not differentiated insight or industry intel. Just more analysis and more pages. Sorry DEI bros, it's not women or minorities.
The short answer to who is going to help you is nobody. You are going to have to carve your own path. The system is a giant machine with many many cogs and unfortunately whenever one of us cogs falls off, there are countless others waiting to fill in. And unfortunately, as this downcycle persists, it's going to stay this way.
This one hit deep
Agreed with this.
I think that the world has gotten “more competitive” (by which I mean a globally mobile worker pool, severe wage-to-cost of living decline ratios such that “normal 9-5ers” cannot afford to live in NYC anymore without help, corporate operations shifting from “golf course” to “robotic efficiency,” etc…).
This has meant that on the senior end… it’s much harder to “add value” and “go outside the box” when business is basically computer vs. computer and the “old boys club” doesn’t ring the cash register like it used to …
… and on the junior level, that there’s infinite candidates willing to take your place even if it means 80+ hour weeks for lower pay than in generations past, technocracy and DEI replacing “elitism” means that there’s no “cultural uniformity” among analysts/associates (making a union-like mentality impossible), and the prohibitive costs of law/med school + insufficient pay of most others jobs means people will stick with it.
What this results in, is seniors who ask for more and more and more (bc it’s how they stand out now), and juniors with absolutely zero leverage to push back with.
i am working on two live M&A deals.
One with a junior MD like you mentioned. We just throw pages and pages at them. He LOVES exec summary pages. We can never just send an email or get on the phone and talk through our advice. It MUST be on some stupid page we have to churn and churn on to get the perfect bullet.
The other deal is with a senior big whig dick banker that prints. We work hard with him but he doesnt really care about too many pages. He's constantly on the phone with the clients/meeting them in person giving them intel about whats happening with other bankers/clients he meets and where things are shifting. That's value add.
Realistically, it’s not gonna get better anytime soon. The only answers are:
Get a senior MD to like you, become his right hand, and use him to push back on any task that doesn’t come from him
It's worth saying that in banking (like in any other corporate job), a lot of your success comes down to appearances. If you appear to be working hard, people like you, you manage to focus exclusively on important projects, and manage the dynamics correctly with HR / your seniors / your staffer, your life will get significantly easier. It's important to communicate whatever you're doing (people can't guess it), and also put some boundaries (if you've pulled 100hrs, or you're going on holidays next week, don't take a new staffing). People will be more understanding once they know you're capable and have a good attitude (whether justified or not). On the other hand once you have a bad rep it's almost impossible to get out of it.
All the DEI stuff is funny, I don’t think girls have it significantly better than men. Some men can also hide, befriend senior folks, and log off early. Some girls fo work their asses off until 3am just like everyone else. At least in my experience. Not that I support DEI recruiting but once you’re on the job everybody needs to work hard.
This is spot on. The only way to make it work in banking long run is to have a powerful supporter you attach yourself to (or the be “in the family” of someone powerful). This helps you grow and protects you from the nonsense. If you are not in this position by Associate 3, you’re probably beyond redemption. Yes you can coast to ED but you’re never in the fast lane and life sucks in banking if you’re not in the fast lane.
Note to laterals: laterals only work above the associate 2 level when you come in at the behest of a hitter. If it’s just a general filler hire you’re probably screwed.
Note further I’m an exception to this role. But I was so far above my peers in quality I made it out alive but make no mistake, it hurt my career at times and I should have invested more in those who wanted to mentor me. I was too much of an independent prick and that’s not a good thing.
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